Bidding processes are common for obtaining vendors and contracts for the design, production and delivery of non-commodity goods, services and systems. For example, if a telecommunications services provider desires to implement a new wireless telecommunications system in a region having no existing wireless telecommunication system, that services provider may send a request for proposal (RFP) to a number of prospective vendors of such wireless telecommunications systems. Because such a system is a non-commodity system, each vendor responding to the request for proposal likely will respond with a proposal that varies greatly from other competitor vendors.
For example, one vendor may be able to build the required wireless telecommunications system with 100 base stations, 150 switching stations and 10 different computer software applications. On the other hand, a competitor vendor who has designed base stations, switching stations and computer software applications according to a different model may be able to build the same wireless telecommunications system, but require 200 base stations, 50 switching stations, and only 3 computer software applications.
In the end, the performance guaranteed by each system, and the price associated therewith may be very similar even though the components of the systems and methods of implementing the systems differ greatly. Once various vendors have prepared responses to the RFP sent to the vendors by the purchaser, the purchaser analyzes each response and selects one of the proposals for implementation of the required system.
Unfortunately, with such systems, individual vendors have very little opportunity to know how their proposal is evaluated as compared to other proposals, and consequently, individual vendors seldom have an opportunity to modify their proposal or reduce the price in order to obtain a contract. That is, after the vendors submit their proposal and associated price, the vendors must simply wait until they are notified as to whether their proposal has been accepted. Once the purchaser accepts the proposal of one of the vendors, seldom is there an opportunity for a non-accepted vendor to reenter the process to modify their proposal and/or price.
Accordingly, there is a need for a reverse auction method and system that allows vendors to respond to requests for proposals and to bid on contracts associated with those proposals against competitive vendors in an auction environment. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.